Crash Kills G. David Schine, 69, McCarthy-Era Figure

By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

Published: June 21, 1996

Correction Appended

G. David Schine, a catalytic figure in the fierce drama that brought to a climax the chapter in American history known as the McCarthy era, was killed on Wednesday when a single-engine plane piloted by his son Berndt crashed shortly after takeoff from Burbank, Calif.

Mr. Schine, who was 69 and lived in Los Angeles, died with his wife, Hillevi, 64, and their son, 35. No one else was aboard the plane.

Mr. Schine's military service was central to the 36 days of testimony and argument that riveted hundreds of thousands of people to their television sets in the spring of 1954 to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were unfolding in the marble-columned caucus room of the Senate Office Building in Washington.

The hearings proved to be not only a defining moment in the climate of postwar American politics but also an illustration of the immense power of the new medium of television to shape opinion.

To this day, those who witnessed the spectacle can recall Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Communist-hunting Republican from Wisconsin, demanding: "Point of order! Point of order, Mr. Chairman!"

They can see Mr. Schine's friend Roy M. Cohn, the sharp, aggressive chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations -- the so-called McCarthy Committee -- whispering behind his hand to the Senator.

And they can hear Joseph N. Welch, the Dickensian Boston lawyer who represented the Senator's adversary, the Army, admonishing him in the moment that defined his undoing: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

The answer to the question that the hearings were intended to resolve -- whether Senator McCarthy had employed undue pressure in an unsuccessful effort to win an officer's commission for Mr. Schine, an unpaid investigative aide of his who had been drafted -- proved inconclusive.

But Senator McCarthy's conduct during the hearings, including his abusive questioning of Robert T. Stevens, Secretary of the Army, led to a vote of censure against him by the Senate on Dec. 2, 1954. The power he had wielded during his unrestrained hunts for Communists in America was broken, and he died less than three years later. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Welch also predeceased Mr. Schine.

Gerard David Schine, born in Gloversville, N.Y., in 1927, was a graduate of Andover and Harvard (class of 1949) and the languid-looking heir to a hotel fortune when Mr. Cohn brought him to work for the investigations committee, headed by Senator McCarthy, in the spring of 1953.

That summer Mr. Schine, as the committee's chief consultant, and Mr. Cohn were dispatched to Europe by the Senator to inquire into "subversion" in the offices of American agencies there. They seemed comic and callow, and were pursued by British correspondents who chanted a parody of an old vaudeville routine: "Positively, Mr. Cohn! Absolutely, Mr. Schine!"

But they spread fear through embassies and consulates, and some officials lost their jobs because the Cohn-Schine team found detective stories by a pro-Communist writer on the shelves of one Federal agency, the International Information Administration.

In the fall of 1953, when Mr. Schine was drafted, the committee was in the midst of an acrimonious investigation of alleged Communist infiltration of the Army Communications Center at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

The Army contended that Mr. Cohn, Senator McCarthy and others had used pressure to demand that Private Schine be given a commission and other preferential treatment. The Senator retorted that the Army was using Private Schine as a "hostage" and that Secretary Stevens had tried to "blackmail" the committee into dropping its Fort Monmouth inquiry by threatening to publicize Mr. Cohn's activities on Mr. Schine's behalf.

On March 16, 1954, the committee voted to create a special subcommittee -- with another Senator, Karl E. Mundt, Republican of North Dakota, as chairman -- to look into the dispute. The stage was set for a tempestuous spectacle.

The ABC and DuMont television networks decided to carry the hearings live when they began on April 22, and by the time they ended on June 17 had transmitted 187 hours of coverage to an audience that sometimes numbered 20 million. One hundred twenty newspaper and magazine reporters were assigned to the hearings. The Associated Press later said that it had carried more than a million words about them, and The New York Times printed complete transcripts. Thirty witnesses testified, and the Capitol police estimated that 115,000 people attended.

There was testimony that Private Schine had gone absent without leave from Fort Dix, N.J., that he had been released from drills to accept hundreds of phone calls and that he had received passes every weekend and holiday during basic training. When the hearings began, he was transferred to Fort Myer, Va., near Washington, for the duration. He himself testified briefly, concerning the authenticity of a disputed photograph that purported to show him alone with Secretary Stevens.

When he left the Army in 1955 after two years of service that had eventually led him to a military police unit in Anchorage and elevated him only to the rank of corporal, the 28-year-old Mr. Schine said he was finished with politics and investigations of communism. He said he would devote himself to the hotel business.

For a time he served as president of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, part of the $150 million coast-to-coast theater, hotel and real estate empire of his father, J. Myer Schine. After some of the properties had been sold, Mr. Schine continued to maintain ties with the remaining enterprises. He became involved in film making, achieving success in 1971 as the executive producer of the Oscar-winning thriller "The French Connection." He also produced records.

In 1977, he and Mr. Cohn, maintaining that they had been defamed by a television movie about Senator McCarthy called "Tailgunner Joe," sued Universal Studios and NBC for $40 million. A New York appellate court ruled that they had no case.

In recent years Mr. Schine dabbled in the arts. Semi-retired, he was developing "Saturday Matinee," a compilation of clips from his library of Republic Studios films, and was planning a stage production of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." When he died, he was on his way to Palo Alto, Calif., to look at a theater for it.

In 1957, Mr. Schine married Hillevi A. K. Rombin, a native of Aofta, Sweden, who was a Swedish national decathlon champion before becoming Miss Universe of 1955. The couple leave five children: Mark, the twin of Berndt; Vidette Perry, Kevin, Axel and Lance. Also surviving are four grandchildren.

Photo: G. David Schine, center, with his friend Roy M. Cohn, right, andSenator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1953. (The New York Times)

Correction: June 22, 1996, Saturday An obituary yesterday about G. David Schine, a central figure in the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, misstated the relationship of two of his sons. Berndt Schine, who died in a plane crash with his father, was the twin of Kevin, not of Mark.